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I've looked into this before. It involves a lot of little tiny screws. I believe the count is upwards of 40 or so. This was more than I wanted to mess with. Plus there really aren't any drive tray bevels made for the drives that are available, that I have seen, which means you must make your own. Too much for me again. There is info out there about doing it yourself, or you might want to ship it to MCE.

I've looked into this before. It involves a lot of little tiny screws. I believe the count is upwards of 40 or so. This was more than I wanted to mess with. Plus there really aren't any drive tray bevels made for the drives that are available, that I have seen, which means you must make your own. Too much for me again. There is info out there about doing it yourself, or you might want to ship it to MCE.

Hmm...that's actually interesting. I would have assumed that, as long as you had the actual Combo drive from an iBook, it would be a straight-forward swap. When my Comqrap notebook died, I removed its "combo" drive and installed it into our older Toshiba notebook. It was just a matter of a few screws and a connector, and amazingly, it worked perfectly the first time I started the computer.

Thats a good question. I just assumed that you could, judging by the way the original question was phrased. It sounded to me like the question was whether or not it was possible to do a DIY installation, so I figured there was already access to the drive itself. That's probably not the case though, and when all is said and done, I think your MCE suggestion was probably the best/most cost-effective one. I'm sure that a Combo from Apple would hardly be inexpensive, even with a DIY installation. My only other thought would be to try to sell the CD-ROM iBook and purchase a refurbished or slightly used Combo machine.

Thats a good question. I just assumed that you could, judging by the way the original question was phrased. It sounded to me like the question was whether or not it was possible to do a DIY installation, so I figured there was already access to the drive itself. That's probably not the case though, and when all is said and done, I think your MCE suggestion was probably the best/most cost-effective one. I'm sure that a Combo from Apple would hardly be inexpensive, even with a DIY installation. My only other thought would be to try to sell the CD-ROM iBook and purchase a refurbished or slightly used Combo machine.

Thanks to both of you for your replies. I can buy a combo or superdrive from my Mac authorized dealer -- about 250 for the combo and nearly 400 for the superdrive. However, they also want in the neighborhood of 600 to install.
Thus, the question.

Emrys. I can't seem to find any info from MCE re: install price and I can't believe that the purchase price of the unit will cover the install. Has anyone had MCE do this and how much was it?

As for selling the ibook -- it's a company model -- I'm a school teacher -- but I want to be able to burn CD info for my students. Perhaps I should just get a good external burner and lug it around.

Well if it isn't your machine, I definitely wouldn't put any money into it, especially with parts you can't take out when you need to give it back.

I have no idea about the prices from MCE. I just found them, and thought it was a good idea. I don't need a burner in my iBook that bad. I have one in my iMac, and 2 in my Win2K machines, so I have all the burning power I need.